Who's to blame?

June 03, 2010

Oil is gushing from a damaged well into the Gulf of Mexico, and Americans want to know what happened. Which is code for: We all want to know who's to blame.

Earlier this week, Attorney General Eric Holder made a smart decision by launching a criminal investigation into the spill. The key question: Was this disaster caused by bad judgment calls or were people criminally negligent?

We won't have answers for a while.

But let's consider some possible conclusions.

Conclusion one: The petroleum and drilling industries have been skating too close to the edge for too long and finally got burned by The Big One. If that's true, then the Deepwater Horizon rig is neither more safe — nor more dangerous — than the many that surround it in the Gulf of Mexico.

Conclusion two: BP and the other companies running Deepwater Horizon took singular risks. They ignored warnings. They cut corners and fudged safety procedures to save time and money. Deepwater drilling is safe, if done properly.

Conclusion three: Terrible accidents happen. If there's a one in a million chance for an accident to happen, it will happen …sometime.

So far, the clues about what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon are spooling out slowly. We've learned the final cementing of the wellhead failed to prevent gas from surfacing and causing an explosion. The blowout preventer — a huge contraption that fits atop the well and is supposed to shut it down in an emergency — failed. Congressional investigators said it had a dead battery and was leaking hydraulic fluid.

Every day brings more tantalizing revelations: Muddled emergency procedures on the rig. Unusual last-minute changes of the well's configuration. And so on.

It's impossible for those of us who don't make our living on oil rigs to figure the importance of these shards of information.

Oil rig operators, like most businesses, don't operate strictly "by the book." They improvise, within safety limits. They calculate risks — and yes, even safely cut corners — based on past performance.

Pushing a drill underneath 5,000 feet of water is like sending a space shuttle into orbit 200 miles above the Earth. It's dark, it's cold and it's relatively safe until … it's not.

NASA had 24 successful space shuttle missions over 57 months before the Challenger exploded in January of 1986. Oil companies had drilled hundreds of deep water wells in the Gulf of Mexico since the 1990s before the April 20 explosion.

It's safe to assume that rigs will be made safer after this debacle. Procedures will be tightened. Drilling companies will be more careful.

But the risks of another catastrophe, another major spill, will never be zero.

People still make bad decisions under pressure. Equipment fails.

The high-powered panel that solved the Challenger disaster didn't foresee the Columbia explosion — from a different cause — 17 years later.

Did BP dangerously push the envelope? Or was it just this rig, this time, a terrible cascade of unforeseen events?

The Justice Department probe should help answer those questions. Until then, we shouldn't, as the lawyers say, assume facts not in evidence. Let investigators find the truth about what happened and who's to blame.

That's the best way to make sound decisions about the future of deep water drilling in the Gulf.